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iPhone

Checking out the twittersphere, and still LOVING real time search, (which i spoke about in my SMX Presentation btw). I found that quite a lot of people have upgraded their iPhones to firmware 3.0. When i say “quite a lot of people” i actually mean Apple fanatics that have been tweeting up to a bazillion messages an hour, counting down the seconds until Apple released firmware 3.0. I would be one of those people but i am waiting to see what the iPhone Dev Team release until i take my next steps 😉

Source: http://www.thebitsource.com/

Anyway, a lot of people have been upgrading in the UK and trying out the MMS on the iPhone. It seems the majority of people have been having problems so i have gathered some info from around the net that may answer your questions.

In a blog post i wrote last November about How to get MMS working on the iPhone with O2 i stated that iPhone contracts aren’t set up to actually send the MMS message to the device. Instead they hold the message on the internet and send you an SMS message to tell you how to access it using your browser. This indicates that all those contracts would have to be updated to allow MMS message to be sent directly to the device, and of course, O2 would have to send the MMS settings to the iPhone using an over the air update.

This seems to hold somewhat true as many users are tweeting that they couldn’t send MMS message until a text came through from O2 with the MMS settings.

So, if you are having problems, i am afraid your just going to have to wait until O2’s computer gets round to your ‘contract’ and sends you the settings message, then you’ll be MMS’ing in no time.

Oh, and for those that are wondering, the cost of sending an MMS message on O2 with the iPhone is the same as sending 4 SMS messages. That will either be taken from your free text message allowances or, i assume, be charged at 40p 25p (thanks Finch) if you have none remaining for that month.

Some people have also tweeted that you can just send an MMS to 0101 or 1010 and O2 will update your settings. Although i obviously haven’t tried that.

Bonus tip: Want free teathering with your iPhone instead of having to pay out £15 a month? Check out this post on how to do it for free

What the hell is Zembly may you be asking? Well according to their website…

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

At Zembly, you can easily and instantly…

author social applications using your browser

participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code

use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications

publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

So as you can see Zembly gives you a way to generate applications for a number of platforms without having to learn the code for each of the said platform. So how do you go about actually creating them?

Basically you have an online editor which allows you to take sample code snippets from other projects that people have made and then insert them into your application. For example you may be trying to work out how you can build a voting system, you would search using the inbuilt search function for “voting” and then it would return you all the code snippets which you could then plug straight into your application.

Once you have your application built you can then save it onto the Zembly server so you don’t even have to sort out hosting or setting up your server to handle applications. Once done you can submit your app’s to say, Facebook and watch the millions of $$$ roll on in 🙂 You can already check out a Facebook application which has been made using Zembly called Capitol Punishment, as you can see it is pretty robust.

Zembly is currently in private beta so keep an eye on their site for when it comes available.

Well December has been a really busy month for me, i have been flying all over the place so have had no time for writing any decent blog posts, and this posts is no exception :p

So i just saw in the app store that there is a new app from HP which allows user to select a picture and then send it over wifi to the nearest HP printer, yay. There are times when i can’t be bothered to copy all my images over to the mac, so this makes it so much easier to just print them out directly and stick em on your wall.

Currently, the software works only with 4-by-6-inch (10-by-15-centimeter) photo prints and re-sizes images accordingly, and also the software only prints jpg images at the moment, so any other documents you have will have to be sent to the printer by traditional means. I suspect that as the app grows then HP will start to allow users to print out different doc types.

We all know that as good as the iPhone is (all though not as good as the new iPhone 3G S), it’s certainly not without it’s flaws, one of those major flaws is the fact that MMS messaging won’t work on the device, however, by a round-a-bout twist of fate i have discovered how you can get FULL MMS messaging working on the iPhone. It requires some sweet talking to your service provider but you can get it working in a few steps. [Click to Jump directly to info]

If you bought an iPhone directly through O2 and you receive an MMS message then you will get a text message on the iPhone telling you that you have an MMS message and you have to check online, this is fine since the iPhone doesn’t have any software to display MMS messages but it becomes a BIG problem if you are putting your sim card into another phone, e.g a Nokia N96.

Since i do swap my sim cards round quite a bit i was becoming extremely frustrated at not being able to send or receive MMS messages. I rang O2 and spoke to a very pleasant customer services rep who switched MMS messaging on for me. Apparently it is turned off at the service providers end as they didn’t think that anyone who bought an iPhone would need the ability to send MMS.

So i managed to get to send a MMS messages from my N96 but when i received an MMS i would still get the stupid text message saying that i needed to look online. I rang O2 again and asked them to switch off the text message and just have the MMS delivered straight to the inbox, and was told very rudely that this was not possible. I stated that i was told it could be done and the customer services guy told me that i was “told wrong”. Thanks mate!

Not wanting to give up hope i had a search around the net and found the following forum discussion about this topic with many people saying that they had managed to get this working with a friendly customer services representative. Not wanting to give up hope i decided to call once more, only to be told again that it wasn’t possible. I was getting extremely frustrated.

I felt that phoning up constantly wasn’t getting me anywhere so decided to fire an email off to O2. One thing to note here is that the text box on the O2 website doesn’t allow you to write much more than one paragraph before telling you that the text you have entered is too long. Guess what though? It doesn’t actually give you a character counter to tell you how many characters are acceptable. After tweaking the message about 8 times, i *sighed* and hit send.

The response i got back was the typical “Here is a step by step guide to see MMS messages on your iPhone, and there is no way we can allow for MMS messages to come straight through to your N96 when the sim is inserted”, time to step it up a gear me thinks.

So i reply back giving it the angry customer email, you know the type? I have been a customer for years, i spend X amount per month on my contract, i think i will be looking else where for my new contract, blah blah blah. Low and behold i get an email back saying that the switch has been made and i can now receive MMS messages directly to my inbox… Chewie 1 – O2 0… well actually it was more like Chewie 1 – O2 3, either way it was a nice victory.

So after that i gots-a-thinking, if this is working on my N96, could i get an MMS application for the iPhone and then have the MMS working through that? I turns out that there is an application called SwirlyMMS which you can obviously only download if you have a jailbroken phone? I decided to get my old 2g iPhone out and jailbreak it using the ridiculously easy QuickPwn for mac.

After rebuilding the 2.2 package i flashed my old iPhone and loaded up Cydia, found SwirlyMMS and decided to give it a whirl. I got the O2 MMS settings sent automatically by pretending that i had a Sony Ericsson device (you can do this direct from SwirlyMMS) and was ready to go.

I attached a picture to my message and sent it successfully. I waited with baited breath for about 1 minute after exiting back to the home screen and heard the new text message received tone. I picked up the iPhone and looked at the screen, the MMS had been delivered directly to SwirlyMMS’s inbox… fuck yeah!

So, if you want to get MMS working on the iPhone then you are going to have to do two things. The first is that you need to jailbreak your phone and install SwirlyMMS from Cydia. Please be aware that this does void your warranty (although it is easy just to wipe your phone and put the official firmware back on). The second thing is that you are going to have to fight tooth and nail with O2 to get them to switch on MMS messaging for your contract. I am unsure if other people around the world with have the same restrictions so you might want to try just sending the MMS before ringing your provider.

It’s worth noting that no where in the O2 iPhone terms and conditions does it say that MMS will be disabled on your contract, so that might be a leg to stand on?

Also, if you can’t get the settings automatically then you can use these…

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Chewie

Hailing from a mysterious part of the United Kingdom called Up Norf. Dean (as his mother knows him) has been working in web development and SEO for over 12 years, beginning as a developer and moving to SEO in search of the perfect rank. As well as SEO he likes football, beer, girls, and gravy - often at the same time.